page_title: Ben Carson 2016 presidential campaign
section_title: End of 2015
hierarchical_section_title: Ben Carson 2016 presidential campaign / Campaign / End of 2015
caption_attribution_description: English: Ben Carson speaking in Des Moines, Iowa.
context_page_description: The 2016 presidential campaign of Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon and bestselling author, was announced May 3, 2015, in an interview with a local television station in Cincinnati, Ohio. He formally announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential election at a rally in his hometown of Detroit on May 4, 2015. On March 4, 2016, Carson officially ended his campaign in a speech at CPAC. He endorsed Donald Trump on March 11. After Trump won the general election, he selected Carson to be his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, with Carson announcing an additional administration role overseeing the repeal and replacement of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
context_section_description: Both immediately before and immediately after the third debate, Carson began to match Trump for first place in several nationally recognized polls. Prior to the third debate, Carson came in first in a CBS News/The New York Times poll with 26% to Trump’s 22%. After the debate, he came in first in two consecutive NBC polls; in a joint poll between NBC and The Wall Street Journal, Carson had 29% to Trump’s 23%, and in another joint poll between NBC and SurveyMonkey, both men tied at 26% each. With these poll numbers, Carson closed the gap with Trump in most aggregate polls, and even became the first candidate since Trump’s rise to claim first place in both the Real Clear Politics and "270 to Win" aggregate polls, in early November. Carson also further expanded his polling in individual states, taking the lead in Oklahoma and tying for first, with Trump, in Texas. Lastly, Carson came in a narrow second behind Trump in a statewide poll in the early state of New Hampshire, but was well within the poll's margin of error and thus statistically tied with Trump, thus eclipsing Trump in both of the first two primary states.
  With his rise in the polls and a subsequent rise in focus, as well as numerous threats against his campaign, Carson, along with Trump, was approved to receive Secret Service protection on November 5. This made both Carson and Trump two of the earliest instances of presidential candidates receiving Secret Service protection in American history, over a year before the general election.
  Throughout late October and early November, Carson began to face increased media scrutiny over his biographical narrative and repeatedly pushed back against most criticisms. Coming off the third Republican debate on CNBC, where the moderators were perceived as displaying a liberal bias, Carson capitalized on the media scrutiny and claimed it was also the result of media bias, which subsequently increased his popularity and donations considerably; his campaign reported raising $3.5 million in the first week of November alone. Carson continued to increase his leads in statewide polls, matching Trump for first in Arizona, Georgia, Virginia, and Maryland, while also taking the lead in North Carolina and the significant state of Colorado. In a final showing before his national numbers dropped out of the double digits, Carson tied for first (alongside Trump) in statewide polls in Tennessee and California.
  In November 2015, Carson's campaign aired a 60-second TV advertisement in which excerpts from Carson's stump speech were intercut with a rap by an artist named Aspiring Mogul.  They spent $150,000 on the ads, which were aired in Atlanta, Detroit and Miami. Carson initially weakly defended the ad, saying "Well, there are people in the campaign who felt that was a good way to do things ... I support them in doing that, but I probably would have taken a little different approach. He then later said the advertisement was done without his knowledge, that "it was done by people who have no concept of the black community and what they were doing", and that he was "horrified" by it. A reporter pointed out that the advertisement contained an explicit approval statement from Carson, and he replied "Well, obviously. But you notice no more of those kind of ads coming out now."
  After these events and the November 2015 Paris attacks, Carson started slipping in the polls, falling 10 points in Iowa, amid scrutiny of his lack of credentials on foreign affairs. Towards the end of November, Carson made an overseas trip to visit the Azraq refugee camp in Jordan, which was housing refugees of the Syrian Civil War, as part of trying to bolster his foreign policy expertise. Upon returning he stated that rather than refugees coming to the United States, as was being debated, they should be sheltered in nearby countries in the Middle East. In early December, the 2015 San Bernardino attack added to the focus of national security issues in the campaign.
  By mid-December, Carson's poll numbers had fallen dramatically, both nationwide and in Iowa, where he was pollin
caption: Ben Carson speaking at a church service in Des Moines, Iowa.
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